Life cycle

If I've been down in Cook Street Village for a coffee, I usually drop in on Demeter on my walk home.

This morning, the main bathroom door is closed, so I know she is probably bathing. I spot a full bag of recyclable materials waiting in the entrance hall, and figure, rather than just sitting and reading, I can save her energy and time by zipping the stuff to the bins in the parking lot.

I'm carefully depositing the paper first, so the tins and plastic don't go tumbling in the wrong receptacle. A car is just parking, and a couple emerges, with a cat in the carrier. The woman approaches me, introduces herself and gently touches my arm.

"We wanted to give you our condolences on the loss of your mother."

A split-second cool wave of confusion washes over me, as I stare at her. It is comprised of three thoughts:

Nope, I was just up there.

Dang, I should have knocked on the bathroom door.

And finally: This is how it will be; people will say this to me.

The woman spots my hesitation, and double-checks who I am. We have met briefly before, but that was months ago. It turns out the people who have moved into the apartment above Demeter have recently lost their mother. I guess there must be a resemblance. We exchange empathetic observations about the stress on these new neighbours and have a quiet chuckle about the mistake.

I make my way back up to the apartment, where Demeter, getting dressed, greets me cheerily and thanks me for taking down the recycling.

What will be, will be.

Bird in a guilt cage

Birdseed Arguments
Originally uploaded by CB Photography

The house we're currently sitting is the reason we have a squirrel-proof bird-feeder at home. This is the third time we've sat this house and one of the things I loved most about it (in addition to the hot-tub under a canopy of Garry Oaks and a large hill-top garden in which I only have to water potted plants because professional gardeners visit twice weekly) was the marvelous bird-feeder on the front porch where I could watch finches, nuthatches and many other birds. There were two non-squirrel-proof feeders in the back garden and one morning younger daughter and I watched in disbelief as a squirrel systematically scraped the rope back and forth on the tree limb from which the contraption hung until it plummeted to the ground, carrying several breakfasting birds with it. ("Jack! This is where we met!")

I speak in the past tense, alas. While receiving my final instructions from the owner, he informed me that he was no longer filling the bird-feeders.
"The birds come anyway," he shrugged.

Except they don't. I lasted one week before sneaking around to the pet supply store near where younger daughter is having swimming lessons. Somehow, I feel this is probably unethical. It's his house. I'm not sure why he's leaving the empty, dusty bird-feeders up; maybe he intends to feed the birds during the winter months only. But, oh, it's lovely to have them back. I sneakily hose the seed shells off the porch, and plan to stop refilling just before they return. I'm a ba-a-a-a-d house-sitter...

And that's not all I'm bad at. During this morning's illicit birdseed run, I held the shop door open for an attractive gentleman about my age and his winsome teenage daughter. He thanked me and addressed me by name. My heart sank. I've described my problems with face-blindness before. Even when he mentioned the name of his pretty daughter it didn't help, although he said it was she who had recognized me. I assumed it was a fellow-parent from elder daughter's co-op preschool days as we were in the general neighbourhood, chattered a bit and politely parted. I was shoveling birdseed from one of the bins when it hit me. The man is the widower of a high school and university friend who died two years ago, leaving two girls then aged ten and twelve. I have a photo of the family that I took in seven years ago on my fridge. The daughter has completely changed since then...but her father hasn't. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Burning with shame and with the sun that is unseasonably hot for Victoria this year (Ottawa is unseasonably cool, of course), I headed home with my shopping and waited out most of the afternoon's heat in the lower level of the house. Few houses in Victoria have air-conditioning; a week to two weeks' worth of above 25 degrees Celsius isn't worth the expense.

Unlike Ottawa, Victoria's summer heat quickly dissipates in the evening, so I decided to take younger daughter on an expedition to get ice-cream, envisioning the trek down the hill in the golden evening light with the sea breezes wafting fragances. Instead, the sun hung stubbornly above the western horizon in a blazing ball. We arrived at the local Thrifty Foods, passing parades of young children in tow behind their mums. I realized with a twinge how all of these kids would have been born after we left for Hades nine years years ago.

The supermarket aisles were deliciously cool. I encouraged younger daughter to make a selection, narrowing it down by category: "It has to be Island Farms because we can't get that in Ottawa; do you want chocolate? No? Vanilla? Here's six variations on vanilla." She chose the chocolate chip one, of course. Near us, a small family were also mulling over the selection, debating over ice milk or frozen yogurt. The dad, an early thirties civil servant type, called after his wife: "Well, you're the one who has to wear the tennis skirt. It's your choice...." I watched her walk off towards the cashier and briefly considered bouncing my deposit bottle off his bean, but thought the better of it. It might have upset the two young children this lithe woman had borne him, evidently without gaining an ounce.

The climb back up the hill is deceptively steep and relentless, taking twenty minutes of steady plodding. By the time we'd reached the house, I was in an Ottawa-worthy sweat, and checked the computer to confirm my suspicions. Yep, 28 degrees Celcius at seven pm, with a humidex of 33, the equivalent of a mild summer day in the nation's capital. Hades has followed me home.

Who on earth was that?

I'm trying to resist turning the heat up. It was a -27 (Celsius) wind chill last time I checked, but I have an LL Bean fleecy button-up. The only trouble is my right hand keeps freezing up when I work on the computer mouse for any length of time. There must be a heck of a cold spot on the right side of the house.

When I left grade school and entered community college to do my first year of university, I began to notice a strange phenomenon. People would approach me on a street corner and strike up a conversation (a very common occurrence in Victoria, which is a relatively small city), and I couldn't tell who they were. They evidently knew me, but I didn't recognize them. Concealing my embarrassment, I would insert friendly little inquiries into the conversation, in the desperate hope that these would yield clues: "So, how's ..... school...? Oh, really? How about work?" This only got worse as the years went by, and I would try to place these garrulous friendly strangers. Were they classmates? Students? Workmates? Someone from church? Which church? Mine or my husband's? Of course, then we moved to Ottawa and it was game over. My life was filled with superficial acquaintances. (Ottawans don't have relationships; they network.) I couldn't seem to recognize anybody.

The year after younger daughter was identified as having severe learning/developmental challenges, I haunted Yahoo forums for leads, and found one that seemed to apply to myself: prosopagnosia, also known as face-blindness. People with severe prosopagnosia can't even recognise family members, but a milder form might be my problem. Things began to fall in place. The fact I didn't notice this difficulty until I left grade school where I saw the same people every day. The fact that I had a thing for photography, and coped with social situations by being the self-appointed recorder of events. I took copious pictures of my ESL students and kept photos in their files. (If I have a photo of someone, I can usually remember who they are.) Even back in elementary school, I have a memory of standing with my bike at the top of the hill that stood between my school and my home, looking back into the valley that led to the Trans-Canada Highway. I saw a figure at the bottom of the hill and thought to myself: "There's Robbie Wilson." Then I stopped myself: "How do I know that?" I realized that I'd identified him by his walk, and it dawned on me that I recognized the boys at my school by their walks, and the girls by their clothes. (I also made the odd discovery that boys with dramatically different personalities often had similar walks. I have no idea of the significance of this, if any.)

Prosopagnosia. It explained everything. So, this past week The Globe and Mail had an article on it with a link to http://www.faceblind.org/, which features three quizzes. I think I took the quiz on famous faces when I first learned about face-blindness, and of course, did really well. No surprises there. Photo-graphs. Pic-tures. Snap-snap, click-click, say no more. (That's a Monty Python reference, for you innocents out there.) But the other two quizzes feature just strangers' faces, so I eagerly signed up, saying I believed I have "quite a bit" of difficulty with identifying faces. My percentile rank on identifying upright adult faces was 55 (I got 87% correct; the average is 85%). My percentile rank on identifying upright children's faces was 80. (93%; average is 83% - a particular shock as I cannot identify either older or younger daughter's schoolmates, particularly the boys.) I got a 45 percentile on inverted children's faces, but apparently everyone has difficulty with that. The final blow: I got 85% on the Cambridge Face Recognition Test.

So what is my problem? Am I just antisocial and rude? It's true that I found the tests rather stressful, and did a lot of guessing, but that's pretty well me in any social situation. Dammit, I'm still claiming prosopagnosia as my shield and salvation. Besides, it's a mighty impressive word. Gotta love those Greek roots...